AUSTRALIAN POETS AND POETRY

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28222, 9 March 1957, Page 3

AUSTRALIAN POETS AND POETRY

[Reviewed by W.H.O.j

The Miracle of Mullion Hill. Poems by David Campbell, Angus and Robertson. 69 pp. The Hexagon. Hal Porter. Angus and Robertson . 55 pp. Australian Poetry 1956. Selected by A. A. Phillips. Angus and Robertson. 80 pp.

Among the great mass of Australian verse being published currently, the work of David Campbell stands out as being the product of a more orderly and interesting mind than most of his contemporaries. Technically, he has it over most of them, too. Many Australian poets are technically at the kindergarten stage; of the remainder, too many wear their technique like an ill-fitting and ostentatious suit of clothes. Mr Campbell has struck that desirable point where technique is both admirable and unobtrusive. That is not to say that this book is innocent of the errors which beset those who too exclusively favour carefully scanned lines and regular stanzas. Sometimes he must fill a line out for the sake of the rhyme and the metre. Hence he writes “the floating seed from the thistle patch” when he means “thistledown” simply because he is committed to some sort of rhyme with “hatch” in the preceding line. Again, a promising poem, “Who Points the Swallow?” is spoiled by an utterly incomprehensible line “Guide us through the maze of glass” which appears to have no other connexion with the poem apart from the need to find a rhyme for “pass.”

Such seemingly trivial errors, the more serious because they mar otherwise flawless lyrics, are the kind to be found in this book. The besetting sins of Australian poetry, inflation, loud-mouthed speechmaking, moralising, daubing on local colour with a trowel, are refreshingly absent. There are poems of three kinds here. In the opening section there is a group of carefully turned and frequently successful lyrics. Their starting point (but never, thank goodness’ their finishing point) is usually with some event of phenomenon of nature, a bird, a tree or a wind, I But they are not treated in the mood of a reporter intent upon preserving local colour; they are symbolic devices employed as vehicles for mediation and praise. Many of these poems could hold their heads up in any company. In the second and third sections of the book, we have Mr Campbell the Australian bard, celebrating the time-worn archtypes of drover, cattleman, shearer, and the rest of the outback dramatis personnae. The most interesting thing he has done here is to wed the characters ot the outback with the conventions of pastoral poetry. Just as Spenser’s Colin does not talk dialect, so Mr Campbell’s swagmen are, to our relief, not authentic Australian characters. They are something far more interesting: Active persons used by the writer to mediate upon the features of the outback scene and to distil something of its essence. There are also one or two good funny stories, “Jack Spring” for instance, and one entirely successful song “Under the Coolabahs” which reduces far-famed “Waltzing Matilda” to the level it deserves. The book ends with a group of quite different poems, in which Mr Campbell turns his attention from the artificial world of an imaginary outback, to the real world of people, art and ideas. He explores, sometimes with humour, sometimes with pathos, sometimes with satire, the lives of ordinary people, of a poet like the Australian Kenneth Slessor. of an artist like Degas. It would be hard to say he was uniformly successful —indeed, some of the worst poems, the slackest and the least well-controlled, occur in this section. But there are some successes here too. This is probably Mr Campbell’s way out of the limitations of his good qualities. Few can go on writing “pure” lyrics for ever, no-one, surely, could rest content for long with the narrow world of the literary outback. This book, then, ends upon a note of promise rather than that of a successful breaking of new grounds. Less need be said about Hal Porter’s volume “The Hexagon.” if only because this reviewer must confess himself unable to understand a good deal of its contents. The blurb notes Mr Porter’s "clarity of vision and precision of image’’; after such an introduction it is a disappointment to move in a seemingly arid

waste of inflated sentiment and needlessly complex language. Mr Porter appears determined to dress up the simple in the clothes of verbal complexity. Few things, we know, are really simple; the truth, we are assured, is to be found among shades of meaning. But verbal complexity may be a disguise for muddled thought; too dense a concatenation of images and words may well inter rather than elucidate a theme. From time to time the very violence of Mr Porter’s images, and the mere extremity of his disgust at the various manifestations of human folly, ugliness and error, results in the composition of lines and stanzas of great power. If he manages to extract his head from the bag of words he mistakes for the poet’s mantle, he will certainly write original and moving verse. Australian Poetry 1956 presents its usual cross-section of work in progress, this time with more emphasis upon the verse of comparatively unknown writers. This annual collection is always rather a hit-and-miss affair, and this time it does make a few notable hits. The younger generations stand up well beside their elders, Randolph Stow, Vivian Smith, Sylvia Lawson, and Ray Mathew in particular.